Let me preface this blog post by saying I love Pinterest; it is a ton of fun and highly addicting, but it could use some work in some important areas.
In no particular order:
1. Pinterest’s Search Results
Pinterest seems to take a while to update their search results. After creating a pin with a proper description, hashtags, etc., it won’t be found in search when you do a search for the tag immediately after creating it. Maybe pins need to be indexed similarly to the way blog posts need to be indexed before a search engine will make them visible to the public. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve seen plenty of people complaining about how their pins aren’t appearing on Pinterest right away or at all. Another possibility for this issue is Pinterest takes a while to trust new pinners before they allow their pins to be unleashed upon the Pinterest community. I know Tumblr has a bit of a wait period before posts made by new users appear on tag pages, but Tumblr’s wait period isn’t nearly as long as Pinterest’s.
2. Pin Scheduling
I would love it if Pinterest had some built in tool that would allow us to schedule our pins and repins. Tumblr has a queue which gives its users the ability to schedule their posts and reblogs and it’s free to use. Twitter and Facebook have free tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, among others that are great for scheduling tweets and posts. Where’s Pinterest’s free scheduling tool? I’ve heard of Pingraphy, but it doesn’t appear to be free.
I don’t know about you, but seeing my Pinterest home page covered with pins from one pinner can get overwhelming. If these pinners had a way to schedule their pins, they would be much less annoying, or at least, one would hope.
3. Finding Group Boards
Once upon a time, Pinterest had a nice little spot where you could find their group boards with this link right here: http://pinterest.com/groupboards/, but if you click this link right now, you’ll see there’s nothing there anymore. At least that’s how it is at the time of the writing of this blog post. Group boards are a great way to collaborate with other pinners to build a board that focuses on a particular topic.
It used to be easy to find group boards by using the link I posted above, but now, I have no idea how to find them. Sure, I can type in the words group board in Pinterest’s search field, but that would only return group boards that have the words “group board” in their title and not all group boards are going to have those words in their title. If one of you knows how to find group boards, please let me know. Hopefully, Pinterest will make finding group boards easy again and that link I posted will go back to its original usefulness.
4. Too Little Social Interaction
I know you can post comments on pins and invite pinners to join group boards, but that’s about the extent of how much communication that’s done on Pinterest that I know of. It doesn’t appear that many people comment on pins either. Sure you can follow pinners and boards too, but that alone doesn’t make for a social networking community. It would be great if there were a way to send pinners private messages or even a way for pinners to have a conversation, but there isn’t; at least I have yet to see this on Pinterest.
5. The Help Desk
I’m not going to go on a rant here, but Pinterest’s help desk seems to be understaffed. If someone told me they only had four or five people handling the hundreds or thousands of emails they probably get per day, I would not be surprised. I remember when I first joined, I asked what I thought would be an easy question for them, but I didn’t get a response until a week or so later. It was just a question about pin board categories, but my guess is they’re swamped over there and it is understandable for a company that is as new as they are.
Honorable Mention
I didn’t add this to my official list because I hadn’t thought about this as an issue until I read this blog post recently. I remember when I first joined Pinterest how I had to follow pinners and boards, but on other social networks, forced following doesn’t exist. Pinners who already have a ton of followers are reaping the rewards of this system; even ones who haven’t been active for months (not naming names) are raking in the followers.
I’ll admit this issue doesn’t bother me as much as the other issues I mentioned, but that’s only because I haven’t thought about it nearly as long since I just recently discovered that blog post. I’ll try not to think about it too much for the sake of positivity (too late, I know, ha!).
So, there’s my list. Hopefully, Pinterest is just experiencing some growing pains and will make improvements along the way, so I’ll cut them some slack for now.
